Wednesday Update - Episode 484 + Personal Voice

New episode of the podcast and a reminder to trust your voice

As I settle into this space, which feels so tantalizingly expansive after mostly only sharing writing in the cramped quarters of the Instagram post box for so long, I am tamping down my desire to fill screens and screens. Trying not to flood your space, this week, I am trying a compilation post so that what reaches your inbox isn’t endlessly long, but gives you the threads to follow, if you wish.

A few threads today:

• New episode of the podcast

• A post about trusting your voice and not letting what happens (or doesn’t happen) in social media derail your projects or dictate your work

• Illustrate Your Week information and Week 9 prompts

March is the Month of Expectation. ~Emily Dickinson

Episode 484 of the Creativity Matters Podcast

Episode 484 is live. This show carries the title Habit Stack and Yellow Roses, and yet it could have had a variety of titles. This is an episode of small vignettes and updates, musings on creative habit and routine. I did do a show sketchnote as I listened back the first time. The sketchnote is something I’ve talked about for years, and integrating it now as a tangential practice is something I’m really excited about. Capturing even the contours of an episode in sketchnote form brings everything together visually, and doing it concurrent with production is the goal. (This project, more than anything else I’ve ever done, makes me think I need to go digital. Would that dilute the impact of the notes?)

I waited too long to post the show, which always opens the door for self-doubt, but when I glance at the sketchnote, I see that the episode holds together in ways that are true to the CMP. I do wish I had a picture of the little free library that gets mentioned. Simplified icons and drawings are, really, the name of the game with sketchnotes. Simple icons are all the sketchnote needs, but when I added a small drawing for the library, the childlike rendition of a house felt wrong. It felt like it needed more veracity, but without a photo, I didn’t have anything to anchor a drawing. Someday, maybe I’ll go back and snap one.

In this episode, I talk a little bit about AI tools. Because of that, when I recorded the intro, I mentioned that I should see what Chat GPT would call the episode, based on the short list of highlights. It hasn’t heard the show, of course. It hasn’t read my notes. (Definitely not!) So it didn’t have much to work with, but it did come up with an interesting list of episode titles. On their own, these titles are all completely logical. At the surface level, they all seem to make sense as strings of words. Conceptually, they sound like they could work. Many of them are completely inaccurate for the episode, but as an exercise, I enjoyed this. Writing is, after all, a game of words.

As for the title I picked, the one that I picked in that final moment when I was ready to record the intro and thought about the things I was going to talk about, I’m happy with what I used: Habit Stack and Yellow Roses. I like the non-sequitur of the yellow roses and even that it might seem to suggest, on the surface, like I received roses, which isn’t at all what that moment was about. This ambiguity and maybe even slight misdirection works for me. Here is what Chat GPT suggested:

Maybe I’ll use these as ideas in the future! Even a taste of ChatGPT makes clear that all of this really is complicated! (In this episode, I also talk a bit about using Midjourney to see what it would generate for my 100-day series. That led me to an idea that has really taken hold for some future drawing.)

All of this is to say that Episode 484 is available. But this is a behind-the-scenes peek you can only read here! Every moment is an onion!

Trusting your voice and not letting what happens (or doesn’t happen) in social media derail your projects or dictate your work

This is a post I hope you’ll read. It’s a reminder, for all of us, that while data and external cues about value are important in some contexts, most of us really need to try and tune them out and stay true to our inner voice. Read the post…

Illustrate Your Week - Week 9

I am going to post the prompts for Illustrate Your Week each Sunday here on the substack. (I also post them at Instagram.) This week, along with the prompt set, I did a bit of a deep-dive and gave some additional context and explanation of this flexible, personal illustrated journaling project.

If you are new to #illustrateyourweek, I encourage you to check out this post. In the years I’ve been sharing the weekly prompts, I have shared lots and lots of information, tips, mentality and methodology about keeping a personal journal like this. I am now working on compiling that information into something longer and more substantial. But as a way of introducing the prompts here, I thought some explanatory information might be helpful! Read the post….

Happy March 1!

If no one said rabbit, rabbit to you today, then I’ll be the one: rabbit, rabbit. I hope you have a wonderful month ahead. For all of you working on a 100-day project or series, I hope it is going well and you are enjoying the process. That’s what matters.

Thank you for reading, listening, and supporting this creative journey. I’m glad we are walking this path somehow in proximity to one another.